


sky is falling

by RedAnthem



Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: A.J. Carmichael - Freeform, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Apocalypse, Bisexual Vanya Hargreeves, F/M, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Number Five | The Boy-centric, Sibling Bonding, Slow Burn, The Commission, Vanya Hargreeves-centric, everyone is 23 in this AU, how come herb has a tag but not fishman, unless i'm just stupid
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-09
Updated: 2021-02-25
Packaged: 2021-03-14 22:21:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 15,252
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29303391
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RedAnthem/pseuds/RedAnthem
Summary: It's October 1st, 2012.Luther is on a mission to protect the kid son of a guy Reginald owes a favor to. Vanya is reeling after publishing her autobiography. And Five has just slammed face-first into a birthday cake after nearly a decade barely surviving in the Apocalypse. It changes a lot of things.Chapter 4: recurrences. Luther visits Vanya, looking for Five. Five's looking for answers. Camille and Vanya are adjusting to their house guest. There is nothing new under the sun.
Relationships: Luther Hargreeves & Reginald Hargreeves, Number Five | The Boy & Luther Hargreeves, Number Five | The Boy & Reginald Hargreeves, Number Five | The Boy & Vanya Hargreeves, Number Five | The Boy/Vanya Hargreeves, brief Vanya/OC
Comments: 21
Kudos: 56





	1. an acorn fell

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Happy Twenty-Third](https://archiveofourown.org/works/18015824) by [schmelia](https://archiveofourown.org/users/schmelia/pseuds/schmelia). 



_Right behind him came Odysseus, into his own house,_

_looking for all the world like an old and broken beggar_

_hunched on a stick, his body wrapped in shameful rags._

* * *

Luther wonders if he looks as ridiculous as he feels. 

He knows he must be doing important work still, somehow. It’s a hero’s duty to protect the innocent, and the kid of this guy that dad owes a favor to is an innocent. So it’s not for nothing. 

The birthday boy’s dad strides over and calls for the kids to gather around the long table they set up. The cake on top looks large and perfect, bigger than any cake Luther had for his and his siblings’ birthdays. Dad thought too much sugar was unhealthy for them. Luther fears for the kids’ arteries. 

The dad lights the boy’s candles and starts off the chorus; several dozen kids scream the birthday song out of tune, their voices amplified by the (unfortunately) wonderful acoustics of the room, which is used for mid-scale music performances on other days.

After the delighted boy blows out his candles and grabs a plastic knife to cut the cake, is when all hell breaks loose.

Because all of a sudden, Luther sees a familiar blue warp of energy, and somebody has landed on the cake.

* * *

Vanya had been trying to exit quietly so she wouldn’t alert Luther to her presence. She was supposed to help the other orchestra members with a small concert in the birthday boy’s honor, but she couldn’t stand being in the same room as her brother.

Especially after she published her autobiography, only a couple months prior.

Alerting Luther was an unnecessary anxiety though, probably; it’s not like her siblings were known to take notice of her.

She’s closing the doors behind her when she sees a strange and familiar warp of blue where the table is supposed to be, where instantaneously, a dusty male figure faceplants in the boy’s cake. 

Kids start running toward safety with their parents, and Luther rushes forward, instincts taking control. 

Whoever it is lifts his face up and scrubs it off; her heart skips a beat, pouring over his frosting-covered face for any recognizable hints. 

He lets out a wicked, weak laugh, and then flops down onto his back. Something that looks like blood mingles with the frosting in his face and hair.

She’s close enough to see it, so she knows Luther must see it too: the tell-tale umbrella emblem, slightly faded from black to a dark green, on the inside of the man’s wrist.

* * *

_“Five?”_

* * *

Five doesn’t remember what happened, but when he comes to, he’s greeted by the sight of red, red heels and the cluck, clucking of a woman’s voice. 

Odd. It’s not Dolores’s voice; this voice is far too chipper, too much laughter in it. It makes him feel slimy on top of the grogginess he already feels. Another person? He’s been wandering for nearly a decade and he’s the only person he’s come across. 

He’s knocked flat on the dusty ground and he can feel his heart pounding in his head, somewhere between his ears and behind his skull. _This is bad, this is very bad._

The clucks of the woman’s voice begin taking human shape. 

“...You’ve put us in quite the bind, Mr. Five.”

_How do you know my name?_ Is all he can muster out.

“I know everything about you.” Her voice is loud, too loud in this quiet desolate place where all sound is ripped apart by wind and dampened by dust.

She grabs his arm; it aches. Hoists him up with strength he wouldn’t expect her to have. Unless he’s just gotten _that_ skinny, he wouldn’t be surprised. 

He’s numb all over ( _why? Why? He can’t remember)_ and can hardly stand on his legs, but somehow he stays upright. Her grip on his forearm is tight and he can feel her nails dig into his bird bones. In her other hand she’s holding a briefcase.

“I’ll give you two options. Either you succumb to your injuries here and die pathetically, without ever seeing your family again; or, you come with me,” she says.

_What’s in that briefcase?_

Her papery red lips purse. He can’t see her expression—big black sunglasses cover up much of her face, and his vision is spotty.

“Nothing important.” 

He nods his head. 

_Option two please,_ he thinks, and she smiles all shark-like, and that’s how he knows what to do next.

So when she moves to open the briefcase, he snatches it and runs as fast as his legs can take him. She screeches with indignation, starts booking it after him, he hears the _pop pop pop_ of a gun going off, but he keeps running, insensate.

There’s a date on the briefcase and a bunch of numbers that his mind recognizes to be coordinates. He changes it to something familiar enough, if this is what he thinks this is, and hears a whizzing inside the box. He stops for just a second, pulls at the clasps, wondering— 

* * *

He wakes up to the heady smell of isopropyl alcohol and plastic, the smell of the infirmary in the Hargreeves house.

They say that smell-memories stick around longer than any other kind of memory. Indeed, when Five was wandering the wasteland all those years, the occasional whiff of dirty instant coffee grounds would carry him back to those late, clandestine nights at Griddy’s; and the smell of nicotine left behind in cigarette stubs would remind him of Allison and Klaus’s hushed voices on the other side of his childhood bedroom wall.

And here he is, in the infirmary of his childhood, smelling alcohol and plastic again. His whole body is still numb, but in a more pleasant, tingly way. When he lifts his bony brown hand to touch it he can feel the bandages on his head. He’s still wearing his clothes, which look exponentially more grimy now that he’s back in this place.

“Welcome back to the land of the living, Five.”

It’s Dolores; no, it’s Grace, his robot mother and nurse. The cheerful cluck clucking of his mother’s voice. He can see her red lips parted in a perfect smile, eyes glimmering with just the right amount of kind, perfect blond hair needing no surgical cap because it would never fall out anyway. 

He hears the clearing of a throat somewhere out of sight; it’s a masculine and authoritative noise. He’s too high off of pain medication to come to attention.

“Master Five, you’ve been missing for nine years, ten months and 22 days. If you’re capable, would you mind explaining what happened?” 

It’s just Pogo. He relaxes.

“A shitload,” is all he can say, too foggy to care about Pogo’s aversion to cursing. 

“Well, I can see that,” the chimp replies with a sigh. “I suppose we can save your explanation for later.”

When Pogo opens the door to exit—he has to use a cane, _he didn’t used to have a cane_ —Five can see a flash of Luther and Vanya’s worried faces, and Five’s ever-spinning brain halts at the sight of them. The last time he saw their faces, one was covered in grime and blood, cold and still; the other, her faces frozen on the covers of her own memoir. 

The thought triggers a primal need to take inventory. He palms the front of his jacket, and feels the familiar rectangle resting in the inside pocket. The glass eye is still there.

His hands are empty, and looking around the room yields nothing.

The briefcase is missing. 

“Mom, where’s the briefcase?”

“What’s that, sweetheart?” she replies, face bent into an empty smile.

“The briefcase. I had it—”

“It’s with your father, now, dear.” 

“He can’t have it. It’s mine. He doesn’t know how it works or…”

“He’ll figure it out dear, your father knows everything, after all. He’s a philanthropist, inventor, and Olympic Gold medalist.” 

It’s true, dad always had the answers to everything, and Five always hated him for it. Comforted by the thought, his mind slips back into darkness.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've always thought it was funny how similar the Handler is to Grace (appearance-wise).


	2. prodigal son, i

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Vanya's forced to confront the past and the passage of time. Five has his fateful meeting with dad, and leaves home again. A.J. Carmichael thinks about what to do with the Handler.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Changed the title and made additional edits. I tend to publish something and then immediately need to edit it again. The former title was amusing but a bit too light in tone, I guess. I might change the summary later, too, who knows?
> 
> As for the fiveya: it'll be pretty slowburn, and I'll go ahead and say it won't go past like, canon Alluther levels. It doesn't need to, anyway, to get what I want to get across, so if you're not a fan I think you'll still appreciate this fic? I hope. Don't judge me too much.
> 
> Anyway, here goes. a longer chapter this time.

_A recipe for the melancholic:_

_Go downstairs to the kitchen. Pick up two slices of whole wheat bread from the bread box, and a jar of peanut butter and a bag of marshmallows from a cupboard. Remember to take a porcelain plate too, for assemblage._

_Remove a butter knife from the cutlery drawer. Slather on the peanut butter onto the first slice and top it off with a small handful of marshmallows. Mini-marshmallows are the best for this purpose; they won’t fall out of the sandwich in transit, if you press them into the peanut butter just right._

_Set the offering down by the windowsill at the end of the hall, next to his bedroom. You have about 20 minutes before mom is scheduled to make her goodnight rounds and feed you your nightly dose of pills._

_(She’s been upping the dosage lately. Father said it’s to calm your increasingly restless disposition. You take the pills.)_

_Kneel in supplication, and watch the lamps flicker in the street. Look for brown-haired boys, scrawny and long-legged ones, about five-foot-six in height, wearing shorts; long, purposeful gait like the whole world is his to wander in. Secretly take the silver locket you keep in your left pocket, and run each chain link between your thumb and forefinger until you can hear the steps of your other brother ascend the stairs._

_Don’t make eye contact. Don’t speak unless spoken to._

_Rinse, repeat._

* * *

Vanya stopped making the sandwiches shortly after Ben died. It was the winter after they all turned 17. 

Allison announced at the dinner table that she had a job lined up for her in Los Angeles, and Reginald didn’t even protest her packing her bags up and leaving, not once looking back. And one by one, the rest of them—except for Luther, of course—followed suit. She’d applied for early graduation at the stiff private boarding school she was attending for dad during her teen years, was accepted into a small liberal arts college in the same city, majored in violin, and eventually, auditioned at the Icarus Theater. She got third chair and put the rituals far, far behind.

Thanks to Five returning, she’s back here, in this house. 

She’ll have to call Camille from one of the phones to tell her she might be home late again. Camille likes getting updates like that. It feels nice, knowing she is missed when she’s gone for too long. 

It might not hurt to look around the house, see if anything changed. 

She’d only been back to her childhood home once after she left for high school, only to find her whole childhood bedroom gone. It was absorbed into Klaus’s, who still came back occasionally when he ran out of options.

The only sign she ever had a space there were the remains of the old wall between them, painted and scribbled over with sharpie. Shelves and various knick-knacks filled the spot where her Spartan bed and desk used to be. 

She’d remembered feeling struck with how easily Klaus, a perpetual drifter, could fill a space to the brim with the objects of living, while she could hardly figure out how to make the apartment she’s lived in for years feel like her own. 

Vanya was never taught to leave a trace. 

But, no—the haunted third floor remains unchanged, crystallized. 

She kneels by the windowsill facing the front street, for old times’ sake. Besides powers, height was another thing Vanya was never blessed with—she hasn’t grown since she was a young teenager, so her arms fit the same on the sill as they always did.

Their siblings used to say this floor was haunted. Little did they know, it was little Vanya all along. They never figured it out, except for Ben. But now he’s gone too. 

This house tends to disappear people.

She used to wander around this place, trance-like; a living ghost. 

Her memories are all clunky and misshapen, with blank voids interspersed in random places. Her therapist said it’s a symptom of trauma; her psychiatrist said it’s just a side effect of her anxiety meds. No big deal.

Her siblings hate her for it, but at the time when she wrote the autobiography, she really wasn’t thinking about them at all. Everything felt so distant, a memory far far behind her. She was unearthing it piece by piece and casting it aside like dirt. 

And she didn’t even bother considering the possibility that they’d actually read her writing. It wasn’t for them, after all; it was for the world, her own debut. Building herself through the paper after being denied any substance for so long.

Maybe she never left this place and she’s haunting it still. 

For the first time since the years she left for good, she feels a sense of unwelcome wholeness. Not a sense of belonging, but like forsaken parts of her are coalescing, oozing together like ectoplasm after being teased apart by time. 

The ghost of the past she denies. The present self she struggles to accept, still.

And downstairs, the future she didn’t know would ever return to her.

All in one piece again, except the edges are warped, changed, and don’t fit as well as they used to. 

It fills her with emotions she can’t place. She goes numb again. 

* * *

He’s not in the infirmary, because she finds him gazing at his own portrait on the mantle, grimy hands stuffed in grimy pockets. 

She was holding one of them while he was passed out in the back of the van that the family used for missions, the one fitted with first aid kits and stretchers. 

The road back to the house was long and quiet; she and Luther both still stunned into silence. Both of them were always quiet people, but they also just didn’t have much to say to each other. 

What could even be said? Their long-lost brother had just appeared out of nothingness. It didn’t feel real.

He’s slippery like that. Never where she expects him to be.

He’s still wearing the rags they found him in; still smells like ash and sweat. The only part of him that’s properly clean is his head, where she can see that mom or Pogo trimmed his hair in order to fix him up.

Standing beside his mantle portrait, she’s struck by how age has changed him. She wonders if this is what growing up is like: you stop recognizing people you’ve known forever.

His voice rings out in longer and lower tones that she would expect. 

“Glad to see dad didn’t forget about me, at least,” he says, eyes falling on her. Aware of her presence.

“Read your book, by the way. It was pretty good... all things considered.” 

She hates the conversational tone of his voice. She doesn’t know why.

“They all hate me,” she forces out. It sounds angrier than she means it too, but maybe it’s all in her head.

“Well. There are worse things,” he says. 

He’s grown up, so so much. He wasn’t supposed to and she’s not totally sure she’s glad that he did.

Her tired eyes meet his. “Like what happened to Ben?” 

He pauses at that. Looks pensive; a bit bashful.

“Was it bad?” 

She nods in response. That’s all he’ll get for now. 

Both of them turn at the sound of soft, rhythmic footsteps. It’s only Pogo. 

His eyes are warm, patient, kind as they always are. 

“Master Five, your father is waiting.”

The man in front of her takes a deep breath, solidifies himself. Very much not a specter, and very much alive.

He speaks. “Let’s not keep him waiting any longer, then.”

* * *

When Five and Vanya ascend to their father’s office, Luther’s already there, like a sort of bodyguard. 

His body isn’t grotesquely bulky and bestial, as it was when Five found him back in 2019. So whatever must’ve happened to him that caused _that,_ hasn’t happened yet in this timeline. 

He has seven years to make it all go right. Not bad, but not ideal, either, since dad has been preparing for the end of the world for _actually_ as long as they can remember, and they all screwed it up in the end anyway. 

Dad is alive too, which Five has, admittedly, mixed feelings about.

The man’s grey eyebrows and the monocle obscure his eyes. Unlike Pogo, he doesn’t look different at all. 

His monocle flashes at Five.

 _Remember: the cameras start rolling as soon as you enter the stage._ They used to say that back when Five and his siblings did televised interviews. 

Phantom ash sticks on the inside of his throat. 

His dad peers at him curiously, and laces his fingers together on the big mahogany desk. 

“Well? You’re permitted to speak, Number Five. I believe I’m owed an explanation.”

So he does. “I told you I could do it.” Five says, his voice tight.

“Do what?” 

“Time travel.”

“I can see that. Against my clear advice, I might add. And as I predicted, regrettably, it had disastrous effects on your wellbeing.” 

_I told you so._

Five knows. God, he knows. He knows he knows he knows. His dad’s words might have always gone in one ear and out the other but they still smudged and scrambled up the insides of his brain on the way, at least.

In his periphery, Luther's eyes are twinkling nervously between his father and Five. Vanya’s staring somewhere at her shoes.

No chastisement was ever private in this house. Not like Five minded having an audience. 

He continues. “Well. I _did_ go to the future, by the way. And I saw your apocalypse. As a side note.” 

Might as well get it out while he can. It’s Five’s apocalypse now, though. Finders keepers.

Dad lets out a familiar huff. “The sarcasm is not appreciated. But go on.”

Five does as he’s told. “The world ends on April 1st, 2019. I saw it in the newspapers left behind.”

“I already know. Go on.”

Five admits he’s a bit stunned. But of course; dad knows everything, everything and nothing at the same time. It’s one of his most frustrating traits, in Five’s opinion.

“The house gets destroyed,” he murmurs. “Everyone dies. Including you, but that’s days earlier. A heart attack.” He tries not to meet his brother and sister’s eyes. 

His father looks at him, considering.

“Go on.”

“I,” Five pauses. “That’s all.” 

“Really? With the whole of the crime scene lying before you, you failed to discern the culprit?” 

The monocle flashes.

Five grimaces. He reaches into his pocket, closing his fingers around the glass eye. 

“I do have… this. I found it in, um. In one of their hands.” 

His father stretches out his own, covered in a white handkerchief. Five obediently drops it.

The man retracts his arm and adjusts his monocle, reading over the text. _Meritech_ is all it says, and a group of serial numbers that Five could recite in his sleep.

“This hardly helps.”

Five’s dizzy. A warm tide rises into his face. “What do you mean?”

“This company, this eye’s manufacturer, does not exist. I will however keep it. In case it presents itself.”

His father sounds like he’s closing a book shut. 

Five’s cards are all splayed out with their faces open on the table; he’s out of options to play. Fair enough. Whatever.

There’s still one other thing, though.

“Dad,” the word coming out weak from disuse, “where's the briefcase?”

His father’s eyes meet his. 

“That too, I’m keeping in my possession. After your arrival, I had Pogo inspect and disassemble it—” 

Five can hear the blood rushing in his ears.

“—and it contained the most curious tracking device. He had to disable the whole thing. I know you did not intentionally lead danger our way, Number Five.”

Something small and spiteful is wrapping itself around Five’s bony rib cage and it’s suffocating him. 

Everything that’s his is his dad’s. He never gets to keep anything for himself. The eye, the briefcase, even the right to use his own powers.

He swallows, grins bitterly. “Of course not. I didn’t even know how it worked.”

His father nods. 

“Though you are an adult, you are still welcome to stay, so long as you agree to obey the rules of the house. Pogo can instruct you if your... sojourn, has at all affected your memory. You’re dismissed, Number Five.”

Five meets his father’s cold blue eyes head on. He grits his teeth.

He can feel the air pressing in, collapsing. And he leaps. 

* * *

Dad dismisses Luther too after Five jumps off again.

_Dad dies in just seven years? A heart attack? The apocalypse? Everyone dies? What happens to Pogo, mom, Allison? Diego Klaus Vanya? Their whole family? The whole world?_

Luther turns around in his bed. 

_What happens to him?_

Dad didn’t answer him, said these matters won’t concern him until later, when they’re ‘necessary and pertinent’. Then he was sent to his room.

Proud, angry little Five. Frustrating as the boy was (is), he’s glad he isn’t in his place. Waking up alone in the infirmary without so much as a caring word from dad, after all those years being gone. 

Five always acted like he knew more than he let on. Sometimes he did, sometimes he was only pretending, just to get under everyone’s skin. It wouldn’t be as frustrating, Luther thought, if only he’d stay long enough to explain everything everyone else didn’t know. But Five never stayed anywhere long. 

Five had to be hiding something.

How could they have all failed to stop the apocalypse? Aren’t they heroes? Sure, everyone else threw in the towel years ago and he has no clue where most of his siblings are, but still. 

Is it because dad died? 

How could dad just _die_ of a heart attack? Something feels wrong about that bit. Too pedestrian. Pogo and mom would never let that happen.

Luther’s room is dark. He can see the shadows of his model planes hanging from the ceiling. The same sight he’s had since childhood. 

He’s twenty-three already; people his age are in college, or graduated. Working. Dating, probably. Living on their own. 

He wishes he could understand his dad. He wishes dad would let Luther in, so he _can_ understand. 

Isn’t that what growing up is? Understanding your parents, and all their flaws. Accepting them as they are. 

He’ll wait here, he’ll be there for when his dad is ready. 

His dad is hiding something too, though. He wishes he’d just tell Luther; then it would be okay, and they could figure it out together, as a family.

Though his siblings might think otherwise, Luther doesn’t think dad is perfect. He was there, after all; every grueling training session, every mission where one of them nearly died, or did die. 

Little Ben, with a whole alien universe in his stomach, who was born with bombs strapped to his insides, ready to go off at any second and kill him. 

It was Luther’s responsibility to help teach Ben self-control. He did his best, but he could’ve done better. 

Luther waits for it all to make sense, and watches the shadows of his model planes on the low ceiling. Miniature biplanes and Boeings, Lockheeds and Loires, perpetually dogfighting in the realm of the imaginary.

He goes to sleep even though it’s only just the evening. He sleeps a lot these days, he thinks.

* * *

While Five’s still at his father’s house, he decides on cleaning up. 

Little to his surprise, nothing in his closet fits him anymore. He scavenges his siblings’ instead.

He avoids Luther. 

He actually couldn’t jump very far from dad’s office, nearly doubling over from nausea and dull pain outside the door, when he lands. 

Mom gave him the good stuff at least; he’ll have to snatch up the rest to ride out the painful parts of his injury. He doesn't have the bottle on hand. She’s not allowed to give them their own meds to-go after Klaus started swiping the fun prescriptions.

Most of Ben’s normal clothes—all black, a little edgy, and yet comfortable—seem to be acceptably close to Five’s size; so he rips a few from their places in the closet and stuffs them into his duffel bag. Ben would’ve been okay with it, if he were alive. 

Well, actually Ben might not have. Vanya’s account implied that Ben was rather possessive of whatever shreds of normalcy he had left in life, these civvies being one of them. A rather natural evolution of his character at 13. Five could’ve predicted that. 

He has to steal his shoes from Klaus. They’re ratty things, hardly better than what he’s wearing already, the only benefit being that they’re clean, worker of domestic wonder that Grace is. They’re still some space at the toe, but Five can’t afford to be a chooser. 

He cleans his mouth, shaves, and showers after that, probably spending longer than he needs to. He remembers to avoid getting his head wet for the bandages, at least. 

Clean water was a precious resource in the apocalypse, and the need to stay hydrated had to come first. And he hasn’t felt hot water in ages.

The mirror is foggy when he emerges; wiping it off doesn’t help him recognize himself any better. 

Donning his brothers’ clothes, he slings his duffel bag over his shoulder and goes to look for Vanya. 

Vanya’s not in the kitchen, or the sitting room, or the library, or the main living room. 

She’s just gone. 

He finds Pogo in a hallway instead; looking at him with those old, knowing eyes.

“Leaving already, Master Five?”

“Do you know where Vanya is?” He asks, instead of replying with the obvious.

“I can call you a taxi to her apartment. You just missed her, actually. She had other appointments to attend to for the day, but she wanted to let you know you were welcome.” 

It’s a nice thought; enough to appease him, for the time being.

Before he leaves, Pogo reaches up to pat him on the shoulder.

“I tell each of you all the time, but I’ll say it again: your father does love you, you know. In his own way.” 

_And I bet each of them wants to yell ‘bullshit’ at you, too,_ Five thinks. 

“He waited for your return all those years, never lost hope.”

...Well.

Five doesn’t know how to feel about the portrait, exactly. Is it a mark of a mournful father, or a lesson to the rest? He doesn’t know.

It’s been so long. Five can’t remember how to be his father’s son again. 

Is it even worth figuring out? The rest of the family seems not to think so.

“I’ll take that into consideration,” he says. 

Pogo knows him well enough; he just sighs, longsuffering as always. 

“Stay safe, regardless,” he says, and waves his cane in goodbye.

* * *

Vanya’s apartment is on the opposite side of town.

He wonders if he ever wandered into her building before, in the future. He explored the whole city then, just scavenging and looking for signs of life, so he must have, at some point. He can’t say he recognizes any of it though. Things tend to look different after they’ve been blasted to smithereens. 

Based on the apartment number with her address, Five determines the one with the large three windows in the front must be Vanya’s, on the second floor.

The lights are on, so she must be home already. He won’t waste time then. If she gets mad at him for breaking into her apartment later, he’ll just say it’s her fault for leaving without him.

At least, that’s what Five plans on doing, but his plans rarely work out the way they’re supposed to. 

* * *

Two identically suited figures stand in a room filled with machinery: screens, switches and buttons from floor to ceiling. All together they emit the dull, yet deafening symphony of cooling fans and electrons buzzing in circuits. 

The harmonic concordance of bureaucracy.

The pair of men—one tall, with a fishbowl for a head, which only serves to emphasize the other’s shortness—are focused on one small screen, in particular. 

They gaze at it, eyes like saucers. 

“She looks awful pissed in there, A.J.,” the shorter man says, nasally. 

Said woman—the Handler—is stomping around in the dust, ripping her perfect blond hair out, ranting and raving, gnashing her sharp white teeth like an animal. It’s a sight to behold, even in such low resolution. 

Being a fish commandeering a man’s body is convenient at times like this. It makes it really easy to hide one’s emotions.

“Well, it is unfortunate,” A.J. Carmichael replies through his vocoder. “A loss of such a passionate, valuable employee. And such an interruption, at such a delicate point in the plan, to boot? Devastating. Simply devastating.”

Herb starts, angling his body toward his boss (as he has no neck to perform the task). 

“Wait, can’t we just send an agent in to extract her?”

“It really is so unfortunate,” A.J. continues. 

“I’ll have a committee assembled, prepare her eulogy. Such a great loss.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Even if AJ might not miss the Handler... I sure do. What will we do without her creepy rivalry with Five... She saved season 2. Rest in peace #girlboss
> 
> And the silver locket is from the pilot script. [Read my Ben & Vanya fic!](https://archiveofourown.org/works/29046549) Think of it as like, a prequel to this one, or something.
> 
> I got the whole plot planned out, so updates are simply a matter of finding time and the energy to write. Hope you enjoyed!


	3. unheimlich

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Doors opening and closing, coming and going. Hazel and Cha-Cha are dispatched on another mission, and Five meets Vanya's girlfriend.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Super behind on schoolwork but I'm excited to put this out here regardless. This fic will easily be the longest thing I've ever written once it's all out (in fact, probably by chapter 4), so I'm gearing myself up for it.

The only time that Hazel and Cha-Cha spent any time at the Temps Commission office was when they were being given assignments, which is something that Hazel resents. Though he couldn’t see himself as a desk jockey, forever mindlessly typing away and compiling paperwork; it would’ve been nice to be able to spend some time with his coworkers, his fellow agents, whom he hardly ever sees due to everyone constantly being out in the field. 

Management just didn’t get how taxing it was to constantly be on the go, chasing after targets and sleeping in motels and eating in hole-in-the-wall diners. He’s not as young as he used to be, and his doctor says he’s gaining a lot of weight. 

He’s put a lot of thought into this issue and has submitted plenty of suggestions to HR in their end-of-the-year survey, but to no avail. If the best two agents were having a hard time, everyone must be, right?

These were the thoughts running through Hazel’s mind when he and Cha-Cha were summoned to Mr. A.J. Carmichael’s office. Sure, it was a bit out of line to say anything—there was a chain of command to follow, after all—but come on. How often does someone get to have a personal meeting with the board president?

“Calm down, Hazel,” Cha-Cha hisses at him. Hazel tended to sweat when he got nervous. He wipes his slick forehead. “You better not be thinking of doing what I _think,_ big guy.”

Cha-Cha was never one that was sympathetic to Hazel’s groaning, sympathy being her weakest trait. She generally considered it a waste of time. Understandably, she didn’t want Hazel to ruin their favored spot in the Commission by getting too involved in office politics or causing a scene.

Mr. A.J.'s waifish secretary knew to expect them and lets them in without any fuss. They were exactly on time, not a single millisecond late. When your company deals with time travel as its bread and butter, there’s no excuses for tardiness.

A.J. Carmichael’s large, stately desk is tucked in the corner, surrounded by bookcases with glass cabinets and tasteful office décor. As Hazel and Cha-Cha approached, he stood up from behind it to greet them with a handshake. Hazel wipes his clammy paws off onto his slacks and returns the gesture. 

They all sit down.

“Excellent as usual performance on your last mission, agents,” the man said, jumping into friendly conversation in a way that was a bit jarring. “Though that’s hardly unexpected!”

“Thank you sir,” both Hazel and Cha-Cha reply. Cha-Cha glares at him to hush it. 

“No need for ‘sir’!” He waves his hands. “Feel free to call me A.J.” 

They both nod awkwardly.

The president plows on, fingers laced. “Do you know what the Temps Commission prizes most?”

“Uh. Keeping the timeline in order?” Cha-Cha ventures.

“Good answer! But I was going to say: _consistency._ Perfect results precisely 100-percent of the time. The consequence of that being, of course, the preservation of the timeline’s order.” 

All introductory stuff. They wait for him to get to the point.

“In case you haven’t heard, there’s been a rather… large deviation. As the best weapons in our arsenal, you’re our last hope at setting this to rights. You’ll both be compensated extra upon job completion, of course.”

It wasn’t good when management started bargaining, Hazel thought from experience. He wrings his hands together in his lap.

“What happened, exactly?” 

“A potential recruit went rogue, stole a briefcase. He’s messing with the timeline and the apocalypse plan.”

“So what, are we supposed to kill this guy and return the briefcase?” Cha-Cha asks, always to the point.

“Yes, and no. The briefcase is forfeit, went dark a while ago. Wasted a whole platoon of agents and… You don’t need to worry about that one. It’s the guy we’re sending you after,” A.J. says, and pushes a manila file folder to them. 

Clipped to the front is a picture of what looks like your average homeless guy—a bit filthy and brown. He looked exactly like the people Hazel saw sleeping on park benches or roosting on sidewalks, nowhere to go and no place to be. Upon closer inspection, he notices how young this one looks. Barely some stubble, bright- but hard-eyed. He tries not to feel sympathy for him. He looks away.

“His name’s Number Five. One of those Hargreeves,” A.J. continues, snapping Hazel out of his reverie. “We were going to offer him an out from the apocalypse, where he was the last man standing, but he didn’t take with our delegate too well. His last recorded time and location are in the file—October 1st, 2012.”

Hazel reached for it, but Cha-Cha beat him to it, and started rifling through the spare few documents they had to work with. Typical. They never gave them enough information before going into the field; something unexpected always popped up. 

Last man standing in the apocalypse? What kind of person are they dealing with, here?

Hazel really doesn’t like the sound of this one. 

“If that will be all,” A.J. says, standing up, “then you’re free to go! Good hunting, you two.” 

Looking behind them, they see A.J.’s waifish secretary at the open door, already standing at attention.

Cha-Cha gets up and starts heading out the door. Hazel gets up to follow her—force of habit—when he freezes, remembering that he wanted to mention something. 

“Sir—I mean A.J., there was something I’ve been meaning to ask you.”

“Oh?”

Cha-Cha pinches his arm. 

The president chuckles. “I’ll admit, I’m a bit pressed for time! Got a meeting to go to. Dreadful thing. We’re drafting a eulogy, it just wouldn't do to be late.”

Hazel nods, silently. Deflates. “Nevermind then, it’s not important.”

“Great. Good luck, you two!”

Cha-Cha drags his arm as the door slams shut behind them.

He can feel her fuming all the way over to the checkout station. 

“I warned you, you idiot,” she grunts at him. “We were doing so good. Got a real prize turkey of a mission, and you almost ruined it with your whining. He practically cussed us out.” 

“But he said good luck,” Hazel sighs.

“You know these corporate types,” she grimaces, yanking the briefcase off the counter after the guy checks them out.

Hazel had to nod to that. 

“What do you think about this mission?” Hazel ventures. “Sounds like a real doozy.”

“Nothing we can’t handle.” 

He had to admire Cha-Cha’s unwavering confidence. The date and coordinates were already punched in at the desk; so all he had to do was grasp her elbow, and they’d be off. She motions for him impatiently. He reaches for her, nodding that he is ready to go, even though he doesn’t feel like it.

There’s a _fizz-pop_ in his ears and a shock of blue-white. The air was hot and cold and smelled like sulfur and acid for a second. 

They take another step and find themselves on the sidewalk of a busy city street next to a large building with a gate. The gate has black iron umbrellas twisted into it.

Unlinking arms, they went to find yet another cheap hotel to stay in.

* * *

Five doesn’t want to risk it; so he walks up to her door, like a normal person would. He does jump through the door though, because knocking is for losers.

The vertigo hits him immediately and he has to sit down on the floor for a while to avoid tripping over his own feet. 

Fucking great.

“Vanya?” he calls out, keeping his voice level. Nobody answers. 

Did he calculate his trajectory wrong? Because this place looks like nothing he would imagine.

The walls are covered in posters for punk bands or concerts or whatever, and surrealist art that looks like kids’ drawings. Not exactly Vanya’s scene. The sink is full of dishes.

The only thing that feels like Vanya’s is the music stand by the window alcove, the only pristine part of the place.

Five wanders around curiously. This _has_ to be Vanya’s place, though. Flipping through the stacks of mail on her kitchen counter, he can see that they are all addressed to a _Ms. Vanya Hargreeves._ And-

He hears a small gasp.

Whipping his head around, Five finds himself a mere four feet away from a strange petite blonde woman, wearing a loose T-shirt, shorts, and some socks. Her eyes are widened with terror, her mouth open in an-almost scream. She’s holding a canister of pepper spray.

He’s on her in an instant, steak knife in hand. The canister rolls away under the couch.

He shoves and pins her against the opposite wall in the narrow hallway. Looking around, he could see the bathroom and a bedroom ahead. He can’t hear any other suspicious noises, except for the woman’s whimpering. 

“What _the fuck_ are you doing in my sister’s apartment,” he growls over the woman’s shoulder. “And don’t you dare scream. I can gut you in an instant.” 

“I-I live here,” she squeaks, breathing fast and quick like some sort of small animal. 

_What?_

“Please, please don’t hurt me! I have money!” She’s crying, rather pathetically. 

“I don’t want your money.”

“Then what _do_ you want,” she cries, her voice thick with snot and terror. “Dear God, I don’t wanna die...”

“What do you _mean_ you live here?”

“I live here! With my girlfriend,” she moans. 

_Girlfriend?_ Five adjusts his hold on the woman. “...Vanya?” 

“Yes-I mean no. How do you know her name?”

Shit. Five releases the woman, who collapses onto the floor. 

She could be lying, if she had simply gotten here before him, or if she was a stalker. But she doesn’t seem to be the predator-type. 

He walks back to the kitchen counter and replaces the knife. “My sister.” 

“Oh.” The woman gasps, frozen.

“Is your name ‘Camille?’” He asks, conversationally, flipping through the rest of the small stack of envelopes. 

“I...Yes.”

“Nice to meet you.”

She stays silent.

He walks past her, stepping over her legs, where they’re strewn on the floor. 

“No—don’t go in there, that’s private-”

He gazes around Vanya’s bedroom. 

He guesses this girlfriend’s presence explains why her apartment looks so strange. The bed’s unmade, and there’s shoes and some clothes laying on the floor to one side. He couldn’t imagine Vanya being so messy or wearing that shade of pink. 

He’s starving, so he walks back into the kitchen. The girlfriend cowers out of his way. 

“Where’s your coffee?” 

“Are you really her brother?” She asks, instead of responding.

“Yes,” he glares. “The coffee?”

She shakily points to one of the top cabinets, and lo-and-behold, he can see the red Folgers canister and coffee filters when he flips the door open.

She’s still quaking on the floor as he starts stuffing the filter into the machine and dumping grounds in. He spots a bag of bread—white Wonder Bread, _Jesus_ Vanya—and untwists the bag, pulling out some slices, shoving one in his mouth. 

“Where’s your cutlery drawer?” 

She doesn’t answer, so he starts opening drawers up himself until he finds it. He searches around for a bag of marshmallows, and finding one—it’s the gross strawberry kind—he starts making himself a sandwich.

He watches the girlfriend curiously from his spot leaning against the counter. She stares back. He notices now that she’s not a true blonde—her dark roots are showing. She must’ve had eyeliner on or something because her eyes are dark and smudged from her sniffling.

Her lips quiver. “Which… which one are you?”

“Number Five,” he responds, mouth half-full of peanut butter and marshmallow sandwich. 

“Um. Okay.” She looks like she’s a million miles away.

Eventually, she gets up and edges into the bedroom. He can hear the door click when she shuts it.

It’s weird—he had no clue that Vanya was into women like that. Then again, she was never obvious like Klaus, who used to barter cigarettes with Allison for her magazines with the cute boys in them because “he just likes their music”. Or Ben, who had an embarrassing infatuation with Emma Watson.

Ben still had the Hermione poster in his room, which was the real uncanny thing. Ben was so excited for the second movie to come out, had been begging Five to sneak him out to watch it for months, and it was going to premier in theaters in less than a week, but then Five… yeah. 

He wonders if Klaus ever came out. Vanya didn’t mention it in her book. 

It’s still sitting in his jacket. He pulls it out, careful not to get crumbs over it, and puts it back.

He’s finishing off the sandwich when he can hear the front door click. It opens, and there’s Vanya, still swamped in her black jacket and jeans, hair in a messy low bun. 

She jolts at the sight of him, holding onto her door frame for support.

 _“Jesus,_ Five.” 

“Hi, Vanya.”

She gazes around the room. “...Where’s Camille?”

Five shrugs and points at the bedroom.

* * *

“Camille, can you please come out? I’m here now, Five isn’t going to do anything, I promise.” 

It’s a long pause before Vanya sees the door crack open. 

“He’s _not_ staying here,” Camille says, voice low and pleading.

Vanya can understand why Camille would be upset. She glares at Five. 

“I cannot _believe_ you tried to stab her,” she whispers.

“I thought she was an intruder,” he glares back. “You didn’t stay to talk. Could’ve told me _then_ . _”_

She rolls her eyes at him, and turns back to the bedroom door.

“I know you guys got off on a bad foot but please, can we just talk about this?”

“No!” Camille yells. “Your brother’s insane!”

“He’s…” Well. She can see it, so she won’t comment. “He won’t try anything now, I promise.” 

It’s been almost a quarter of an hour of this, back-and-forth. At least Camille’s talking to her now instead of yelling at her to _leave her alone._ She came home, Five was there where Camille would’ve been, and he announced that he needed a place to stay while Vanya hammered at her own bedroom door.

Vanya can understand Camille’s point of view, so she can’t blame her for being mad. 

Five is acting frustratingly blasé about the whole thing. 

“Could you just apologize, or something?” She rubs her temples.

“Sorry, _Camille.”_

The voice from the door shouts back at them. “I don’t want an apology! I want him to _leave!”_

Five stares at his sister, an eyebrow quirked, leaning on his hip against the wall. 

Vanya groans. “Let’s talk outside.” 

She goes to the door and ushers him out, and after a moment, he follows.

They sit on the staircase outside her apartment. 

Vanya’s head is in her hands. She had a long day, the weirdest birthday she’s ever had, and all she really wanted was to sit down and eat microwavable ramen with her girlfriend and just stop having to think.

“I can just leave, you know.” Her brother’s voice echoes slightly, bouncing off the concrete walls.

“Then where will you stay, Five?” She says, shaking her head out of her arms. “Are you going back to dad?”

He twists his mouth.

“Didn’t think so.”

“I’ll just stay wherever.”

“And where is ‘wherever?’” 

“Anywhere. I’ll figure it out. Where’s Diego at?”

“...I don’t know.” _He’d never tell me, after what I did._

“Whatever. It doesn’t matter. I’m not that picky.”

“You’re not sleeping on the street.” 

As much as she hated it for him, at least Klaus wasn’t sleeping rough anymore, now that he was in prison. 

Except he was supposed to be getting out soon. Another stressor. She feels her bottle of pills through her jacket pocket.

“Vanya, it really doesn’t matter to me. I’ve been through worse.”

She pauses. “What do you mean?”

He just hums, and meets her eyes. They’re eerie and darker than they should be, in the static mustard yellow light. She’s close enough to see his pupils dilate.

It still doesn’t feel _real._

He cleaned up; put on Ben’s clothes, it appears. She doesn’t know how to feel about that. One lost brother, returning in the form of another. A brother, unfamiliar. Living ghosts.

His mouth barely moves when he finally speaks. 

“The future,” he says. “The apocalypse.”

She recoils, slightly, hoping he doesn’t notice. 

She still can’t believe it. She doesn’t know how much to believe. But it must be true, right? Not that dad’s word meant anything; he’s been saying that the apocalypse would come for years but they never believed him. It was ridiculous, absurd. But where else could Five have been?

They didn’t search for him. Dad said he’d come on his own time, if he was going to come back at all. Then the portrait was put up, and the rest of their siblings went on with their lives. And Vanya too, eventually.

Her eyes drag across his face to his stark white bandages. 

“Are… are you sure?”

“About what?” He’s sure, always so sure, about most things under the sun. One of his more annoying traits, in Vanya’s opinion.

“The apocalypse.” 

He narrows his eyes, cocks his head. Stares. 

“You think I’m crazy,” he finally says, then gets up, shoving his hands in his pockets. He takes a step down the stairs.

“Five, _wait.”_

“You’re just too naïve to understand,” he calls back, not turning his head, already on the next landing.

_Leaving her—_

She goes after him, trotting quickly down the stairs. “Five, listen.” 

“Your girlfriend wants me gone anyway, so—”

She grabs his arm, forcing him to halt. It’s thin, just bird bones wrapped in cloth in her grasp. 

“Five, you’ve been gone a long time. I don’t want to lose you again.” 

He turns around and looks at her again with those too-dark eyes. She hates this lighting. It casts more shadows on his face; highlights age that shouldn’t be there. 

“I’m sorry. I don’t think you’re crazy.” She gazes at where her hand meets his arm. “It’s just hard to…a bit hard, to believe.”

“What’s so hard to understand?” He’s inching closer to her now, shoulders tense. 

Her siblings all knew the tricks of the trade when it came to making themselves appear threatening. Their human weaponry; they’re human weaponry.

“I went to the future. The world ended. There was nothing there, just destruction and death. Then I came back. What _don’t_ you get?”

She doesn’t know.

“Is this really you?” she asks, without thinking.

He pinches his eyebrows together, looks confused. Maybe a little hurt. 

“Nevermind. Look, just…” she waves her other hand upstairs, tugging him with the other, just a little, so he doesn’t fly away again. 

_Physical contact is essential for the ritual supplication. It begins with a favor owed to the supplicant—_

“Could you please stay?” _For once?_

He’s quiet and it scares her. He looks around, the gears in his mind turning. 

“If your girlfriend can be convinced,” he grits his teeth, “then fine. I’ll stay.”

She swallows her heart back down. She doesn’t remember how it got there.

* * *

It takes an hour or two of pleading, but Camille finally agrees to let Five stay. Not forever, but just until he “gets back onto his feet.” 

They set up some house rules. 

Rule 1: Five can’t be home alone with Camille, and must stay out at all times possible.

Rule 2: Five is not allowed in the bedroom.

Rule 3: Five must leave as little trace in the apartment as possible.

To Five’s understanding, he basically has to become invisible. Which, fine. He has other things to occupy his time with, other places to be, so this arrangement works perfectly fine for him. 

Vanya gives him a blanket. He doesn’t sleep well that night. 

It has nothing to do with sleeping on the couch. In fact, it’s probably the most comfortable sleeping arrangement he’s had in the past decade or so. 

He forgot how much noise the world can make, even at night. He tries stuffing his head under the pillow, submerging himself under blankets, but it only makes it difficult to breathe, makes his lungs burn.

Passing cars sound like dust devils, Five learns. Dust devils and windstorms and cracked asphalt and choking on smog and fire, fire that looks so much like the yellow lights of cars passing through the blinds.

He can’t sleep, so he gets up, dizzy. He stumbles toward the fridge and— _there._ He spots an amber-colored bottle of bourbon whiskey. Taking care to be quiet, he pours himself a glass, setting the bottle on the square table. He turns the kitchen light on and pulls out Vanya’s book.

He doesn’t understand. In the apocalypse, he had no problems sleeping, once he was able to put his head down. 

Maybe he is going a bit crazy.

But he remembers it all—it all happened, he’s sure of it. Where else could he have been if not there? And dad believed him. _The eye._ Manufactured by Meritech, serial #011232719. His proof of existence. It was real. It was real. 

He grabs a blue pen and thumbs open Vanya’s book. Not like any of these calculations _matter_ anymore, anyway. He’s back, perfect timing and all that. Not like it was of his own doing. And the thought of using his ability preemptively makes him nauseous. He can hardly jump through doors or down hallways; how could he time travel? 

It wasn’t like anything he ever experienced before. Usually, when he overexerted himself with his powers, he’d be left shaking from exhaustion and incapable of making a jump _at all_. Nothing like this. The unfamiliarity with his situation scares him. He’s not supposed to feel dizzy or confused or ending up in places he didn’t plan on being, his jumps cut short—what if he tries jumping through a wall and gets stuck in it?

He wonders if it’s because of the pain pills. 

He tosses them into the trash can.

He doesn’t sleep at all. Instead, he double, triple, quadruple checks all the calculations and probability maps he’s made over the years, scribbled over Vanya’s diatribes and confessions until the sun rises.

“Five?”

He suppresses a jolt. Vanya’s voice is muffled. “Did you sleep at all?”

“Somewhat,” he responds. He’s still wearing his day clothes, which she must recognize but doesn’t comment on.

She stumbles out of view into the bathroom, and he can hear the water rushing through the walls as she showers and gets ready for the day. He remembers she said something about violin lessons earlier; he’ll have to leave soon.

 _You should eat something,_ he imagines Dolores would say. Her voice sounds so real in his head. He would know. He’s been fine-tuning it for a long, long time. 

He pours himself some cereal and puts away the glass. By the time he’s done eating, Vanya’s out of the bathroom. 

“Let me take care of that wound, then you can go,” she nods her head at the bathroom.

He gets up, stretches; his body creaking from sitting for so long. He pads over on bare feet and follows her. 

The cramped bathroom is still warm and humid. She’s got the first aid kit already set out. She sits on the toilet seat and beckons to the floor in front of her.

“So I can reach your head,” she explains, quite obviously.

So he sits down, her small legs on either side of his bony shoulders, while she gently cleans his stitches.

“The skin's not too red, so that’s good,” she murmurs. He can hear her breathing softly behind him.

“How did this happen, anyway? You really cut yourself up here.”

“I don’t remember. Could’ve been anything. Scavenging in broken down buildings comes with its risks.” 

“Is that what you did?”

“I ate cockroaches a couple times too, so if you ever want to know what they taste like...”

A ghost of a chuckle. “No thanks.”

They both go quiet. He wonders if she’s remembering how things used to be, like him. They used to sit in Five’s room after training and missions, just like this, as Vanya patched him up with whatever Band-Aids, gauzes, and alcohol wipes she could grab from the infirmary. He never went to mom unless he had to, back then; not that he didn’t trust her, but because it was embarrassing, sitting there with the rest of their siblings, getting poked at. He used to hide his scrapes from them like an idiot, too, covering himself or holding his body away from view. Looking back on it, they totally noticed. Or maybe they didn’t. Everyone had their own deal to worry about, after all.

But then there was Vanya, always watching and observing the rest. She saw it all, of course.

“I can put a bandage over this, give you a beanie or something to cover it with.”

“Is it that gross?”

“You wish, sicko,” and there’s something in the flat tone of her voice that’s just so hilarious and so Vanya, exactly as he left her. Five snorts and shakes his head. Yeah, maybe he did, sue him. So did she, not like she’d ever admit that she liked seeing gross shit too.

Vanya pats his shoulder and he gets up, and she follows. She leaves the bathroom while he brushes his teeth with the old toothbrush he snatched from the house, and she comes back with a dark grey beanie, which she unceremoniously throws at him. 

“Where are you going?”

“The library, probably.”

“Take care, okay?” she says, as he makes his way to the front door, duffel bag over his shoulder. He can see the warmth in her coal-dark eyes, a small smile on her face. 

He nods back.

Her smile falls. “Could you… could you come back at 10? 11, maybe?”

“You’re giving me a curfew?”

“No, just… nevermind.” She shrinks into herself. “Take care.”

His bones feel heavy, like lead, as he opens the door.

He feels like he needs to say something, anything. 

“I’ll come back around 11ish, okay?”

“Sure,” she says quietly.

He closes it and wonders why he feels regret.

It doesn’t matter. He has things he needs to do, loose ends to tie up. The apocalypse is coming. His dad has had decades to prepare; he has seven years, and he’s wasting time.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Camille could've just called the cops on Five afterwards. She's being very hospitable actually.
> 
> It struck me how Five has such a radically different attitude towards gore and death compared to his siblings in their childhood. Of course the rest are shocked by Ben's destruction, but Five delights in it, even as a kid. All the while, Ben's horrified at what he can do. And yet Vanya, gentle as she supposedly is, wants nothing more to be involved in killing the bank robbers... So yeah, they're both just like that.
> 
> As for Dolores:  
> My belief is that at this point, Five is still perfectly aware that she's a delusion, but he's lived alone for so long that he ended up hearing her voice as real anyway, and just kinda went with it. Out of that situation it's harder to ignore (or easier to accept) that she was never real in the first place, so it's easier to detach himself from the delusion.  
> Personally I don't really care for the Dolores/Five content out there that paints their relationship as like... this dreamy cutesy thing. She's a symptom of his degrading mental state, not a person, ya know? Yeah.


	4. recurrences

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Luther visits Vanya, looking for Five. Five's looking for answers. Camille and Vanya are adjusting to their house guest. There is nothing new under the sun.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I dunno if I've made this clear, but Camille's not *my* OC, she's Vanya's girlfriend in schmelia's speculative script, (the work this was inspired by), which was written for TUA while she worked there. Just to put that out there. 
> 
> This one was difficult to write, but I'm somewhat happy with it now. Quote is from Freud's Mourning and Melancholia, which I've used a couple of times before, just because.

_ He knows whom he has lost but not what he has lost in him. _

* * *

Pogo tells Luther that Five left for Vanya’s last night. Luther thanks him for letting him know, and fumes while he does his morning training.

History sure does repeat itself, doesn’t it? His brother’s capability to escape the consequences of his actions rival that of Houdini’s. That should’ve been his name. Houdini Hargreeves has a nice ring to it. 

But he’s a part of this family,  _ dammit, _ whether he likes it or not.

Around 1 p.m., once he’s done with his morning exercise routine, Luther gathers up the courage to ask dad if he can go and visit Vanya. Dad shoos him out and scolds him for wasting his time. Pogo tells him not to take it to heart, and gives him her address. He calls a taxi for him, and Luther leaves the Hargreeves house. It feels monumental—he’s practically trembling from nerves in the backseat of the car.

_ What if she slams the door in my face?  _

But that’s not right. He’s the one who should be angry, after she wrote all that stuff about him and the family—all that stuff she had no right to tell. 

She has plenty of reason to be angry at  _ him _ too, though. Her book made that quite clear.

The drive is a bit long. Luther steps out of the taxi, nearly hitting his head on the doorframe of the car. The morning is cold and low clouds wash out everything in sight. Vanya’s neighborhood is quiet, sullen, and empty, even though it’s not that far from downtown. 

He reaches her front door, triple-checking the address and apartment number to make sure he’s in the right place. It’s quiet in her apartment, from what he can tell from his vantage point in the hallway; he wonders if she’s even home. He doesn’t know which would be worse: not finding her there, or actually speaking to her.

Finally, he knocks.

There’s a terrifying pause, before the heavy door groans open, though only a quarter of the way. He can see little Number Seven’s dark eyes peek through, watching him. 

“Luther?” She says softly, her voice barely reaching him. 

He takes a deep breath and braces himself, trying to settle his heart, which beats painfully out of his chest. 

“Hi.” 

He doesn’t know what to do. Being straightforward and asking if Five’s there just doesn’t feel right. Asking to stay and intrude into her space doesn’t feel right either. 

He swallows, frozen in place.

“You’re looking for Five,” she states, rather than asks. She’s just a tad bolder than him, evidently. Vanya’s surprising like that, sometimes.

“Um. Yeah,” Luther chokes out. “Is this a bad time?” 

Vanya gives a miniscule shake of her head. “Well, I have another lesson in an hour… and I was, um…”

“It’s okay,” Luther suggests lamely.

“No, it’s fine, you can come in, I guess. Just real quick,” she says, and opens the door fully so he can walk in. The gesture takes a moment to register. He didn’t think he’d actually get this far. 

Her apartment looks strange—too loud and a bit cluttered and not at all like her childhood bedroom, from what he remembers. Then again, Luther doesn’t know how she might’ve changed her tastes in those years she lived at the boarding school, when they were all teens. 

“Nice place,” he offers, as a token of goodwill.

She murmurs a “thanks” in return. Tiptoeing over to a drab, brown couch that’s clearly second-hand; she takes a seat. He takes the armchair. While fiddling with its tweed texture, he tries to think of what to say. This was supposed to be so simple: get dad’s permission, visit Vanya, ask her if she knows where Five is. But he’s too far gone, and now he’s sitting in her apartment, with too much time left.

His little sister looks just as nervous and lost as he does though, which is a little consolation. Her eyes are like a mouse’s, round and black. “Did you want to talk, or something?” 

“...Yeah.”

“Okay. What about?”

His mind goes blank. He wipes his hands off on his lap. “Nice place you have here,” he says before realizing he’s repeating himself. “Didn’t realize you liked… punk,” he tries, hoping he doesn’t sound like a fool.

“What? Oh,” she shrugs slightly. “Those are Camille’s.”

“Who?”

“My, uh, girlfriend.” 

_ A girlfriend?  _ Luther’s eyebrows jump of their own accord. He forces his expression back to neutrality; nodding and smiling, hoping he looks as happy for her as he hopes. 

Her mouth’s in a straight line, but she nods.

His eyes wander around the apartment.

“Five’s not here,” her voice a near-whisper. “He came, then he left.”

_ Well then. _ “Oh,” is all he can say, his sense of panic rising. 

“Why’d you want to look for him, again?”

Luther shrugs uncomfortably. “Just wanted to talk to him, ask some questions, I suppose.”

“About all the... crazy stuff he was saying, right.”

He sighs. “Yeah. That.” He wonders if Vanya is just as curious as he is, just as concerned and consumed with the need to  _ know.  _

She’s looking somewhere far away, not meeting his eyes. 

“I don’t know where he is.” 

_ Then where is he?  _ Luther thinks.  _ Where could he be? What is he planning? _

He wishes Five wouldn’t make things so difficult. “I guess nothing’s changed, then,” Luther finally says, sympathetic.

Something in Vanya’s expression opens up. Her eyes go wide and dark. “Yeah. I guess you’re right.”

It’s strange, connecting like this with Vanya, of all people. They never talked as kids—he never had the time to, juggling training after training, to be honest—though he had hoped, back then, that she understood that he still loved and cared for her. They were family, after all. It wasn’t her fault she didn’t have powers, he knew, and he never held it against her. 

Even if she held it against  _ them. _

She said so many hurtful things about their family in her book, said things that should’ve never been said out loud. Or at least not to the whole  _ world. _ Everything about the Hargreeves was already broadcasted to every news outlet imaginable. Did she have to take their faults and their filthy secrets and shove it into the public eye, too? 

Allison called him, about a week after Vanya’s book came out. Vanya wasn’t answering any of her calls, or calls from her manager, Allison said. They had wanted to settle things, possibly take some private things out that Allison wasn’t comfortable with. She had a persona to keep, after all, a whole career that was so heavily dependent on the public’s perception of her, and Vanya’s book threw a wrench into everything. Luther didn’t read gossip magazines or watch the news, but he could imagine all the nasty, hateful things they might be saying about her, about them. And he knew that they hurt, even if she blew them off or rumored them away.

Luther tried to understand Vanya, though. Tried to swallow his pride and accept it, even if he couldn’t forgive her just yet. Vanya may have been wrong to share everything, but Luther still failed her, too. 

“I’m sorry,” he says.

“It’s no big deal, really.”

“No, not that. I mean, I’m sorry, for everything. We should’ve… talked more, as kids.”

Vanya is deathly quiet. Belatedly, Luther realizes that he might’ve fucked up.

“I just… I don’t get why you didn’t say something, sooner. You could’ve—”

“Would you have even listened if I did?” Her tone is dull, but sharper than any of Diego’s knives. Sharper, perhaps, because of the contrast. He wants to say  _ Yes, I would have, I would’ve helped you back then,  _ but he’s not sure. It’s too late now, anyway. To suggest anything else, to make any more excuses, would be an even greater insult to her. And he’s already soured his stay. 

“I need some time to get ready for my next student,” Vanya says, already getting up. Luther sighs, then tightens his jaw. 

“I’ll get out of your hair, then.” The armchair groans, as if relieved to be free of his intrusive weight. 

Nothing’s changed, after all.

* * *

_ It was three days after Ben’s passing that Allison announced to dad at dinner that she was leaving for Los Angeles to find her home amongst the stars. Her eyes were daring and bright when she did it, head held high; her (remaining) brothers and sister all waiting on their father’s answer with bated breath.  _

_ “Very well, Number Three. Undoubtedly you will be of more use to the nation’s television sets than you will be to its safety and wellbeing.” _

_ Diego’s mouth hung open in shock.  _

_ “W-Wait, so you’re just letting her leave?” _

_ “Number Three’s rude interruption of dinner was not an invitation for further interruptions. Silence, Number Two.” _

_ “Did she rumor you into saying yes, or something?”  _

_ “Shut up, Diego,” Allison sneered. _

_ And that was that. _

_ Luther never did figure out if Allison found a way to covertly rumor dad or not. Five flew the coop ages ago and dad never batted an eye at his disappearance, never sent out search parties for him.  _

_ It wasn’t like threats or fear of retaliatory force is what kept them there. Luther thought it was love.  _

_ When they were all sent back to their rooms, Allison went straight to hers and immediately pulled out a small pink suitcase, one she didn’t need Luther’s help with, not like she asked. Pogo even called her a taxi. _

_ “If she can just leave whenever she wants, then there’s no reason why I should stay,” Diego murmured to himself, his own suitcase already propped open on his bed. _

_ “I’m only mad I didn’t think of it earlier,” Klaus sang, mouth wrapped around a joint he didn’t even bother hiding.  _

_ Luther felt like he was walking on the moon; he didn’t know if he was light-headed or if gravity was just not working right for him. He floated down the hall, barely lucid and dizzy.  _

_ When he landed at the foot of the stairs, he could see little Number Seven at the top, near the window at the end of the hallway above.  _

_ He hasn’t said a word to her since the funeral, though he’d been meaning to, just to make sure she was okay. She and Ben were a bit close, if anyone could be close to Vanya. He watched as she opened the window and tossed something out. _

_ Vanya walks downstairs and barely brushes past him, shutting the light off behind her. She’s not looking at him or meeting his gaze, but he can feel something strange and discomforting cling to her small form, an evil specter which he won’t recognize until years later, when he reads her book for the first time. _

_ He rises to the window; it looks down at the front street.  _ Maybe he can see Allison. __

_ He does: she’s already stepping into the taxi, luggage secure in her hands. It’s too late to call out to her now, she’d never hear him from all the way up here.  _

_ She wouldn’t even meet his eyes at dinner. She was avoiding him and he didn’t know why. He knew something was up, had been up since the funeral, he knows her like a second mind or another chamber in his heart, but he didn’t, couldn’t expect this, not so soon, and especially not from her. His foundation is crumbling and he feels weightless like he’s going to float away after her but he can’t. He just can’t. _

_ Eventually, he lets his eyes fall down back to Earth. But he never stops floating. _

* * *

_ T-minus-2,372 days until the Apocalypse: _

Five comes back to the apartment at around 11:30 that night. 

Vanya’s sitting there at the kitchen table, alone, with an empty cup in her hand. She looks wan under the harsh kitchen light. He can hear music coming from her  _ (and Camille’s) _ bedroom. Vanya smiles at him in greeting, though it doesn’t meet her eyes. 

“Sorry if I kept you up.” He throws his jacket over the couch. 

“It’s fine. Welcome back.” She tells him about Luther coming over, searching for him; though she lied about not knowing where Five was. She knows him well enough to know he wouldn’t like Luther’s meddling, and he thanks her for it. 

“He kinda apologized to me, too. For not spending time with me as kids.”

_ Now, what could that mean?  _ Five racks his brain and comes up with nothing.

“And? What’d you say?”

“I… I dunno. I didn’t really say anything. I don’t think he really understood what the problem was, you know? He asked me, ‘why didn’t you just talk it out earlier,’ or something. He didn’t get it.”

Five hums at that, and gets up to start making himself something to eat. “Well. Why didn’t you?”

“Because they wouldn’t have listened. They never did.” That is true.

“You were the only one who did, actually.”  _ And then you left.  _ She doesn’t say it, but he can feel the dark undertow of resentment in her voice. He doesn’t say anything in response. He pulls out a small pot and starts filling it with water from the sink.

“You should’ve told me if you were hungry, I could’ve made something for you,” she says behind him.

“It’s fine.” He pulls out a packet of chicken flavored noodles, or something. Stuff he’s eaten millions of times during the apocalypse. Some things never change. It’s all he can stomach, anyway.

“What did you do all day, anyway?”

He tells her. He went to the library, like he said, and went looking for the Meritech building himself. He ended up crashing and falling asleep on the bus and missed the building entirely. He’s still a bit pissed about that, actually, though he hopes he doesn’t come off as pissed at  _ her.  _

“Why are you looking for it? Didn’t dad say it doesn’t exist?”

“Just keeping tabs.” 

Vanya looks troubled at that, but says nothing else, which is good enough for Five. Explaining his reasons would just be a waste of time. 

Vanya promises to give him a bit more cash so he can buy himself food or snacks so he doesn’t starve out there (Five has to laugh at that), and then goes to bed. He doesn’t see anything of Camille, which is just fine for him.

* * *

_ T-minus-2,371 days until the Apocalypse: _

He tries to spatial jump again, now that he’s off the pain pills he received from Grace. It quickly becomes apparent to him that he should’ve just kept the pills instead of tossing them in the trash—it would’ve helped his mood, at least. He tries to jump from one aisle of bookshelves to the end, and ends up just two feet in front of him, feeling like he accidentally gutted himself. 

Moving around is so much slower when he can’t reliably use his powers. 

He ends up being forced to use public transportation, since Vanya doesn’t own a car and he can’t feasibly make a getaway if he steals one, which is humiliating in its own way. 

Dad was right about Meritech. It’s not in any of the Yellow Pages or any other business directories, he finds. When Five take a bus to find the building again, he finds it’s currently owned by some IT company. It’s a dead end, for now. 

In the meantime, he spends his time at the Argyle library, his old home.

Five never left the ruins of the city. He didn’t have to, for one. Traveling far on foot cost too many calories he didn’t have. There was truly no chance anything else was alive out there, anyway, so he couldn’t have missed much. All radios he found and fixed could only pick up static. There were no rockets or planes in the sky, which was constantly covered in haze and smog. 

One time he went to the Pier with Dolores, sitting pretty in the cart, to see Lake Erie. It was the furthest he ever traveled outside the city.

It was just gone—completely vaporized as far as he could see. All that was left was a deep canyon and a great stinking skeletal yard. Complete oblivion. 

Something that could cause  _ that  _ couldn’t have left any survivors.

* * *

The restaurant they’re in is quite nice; private, with curtains and booths. A family restaurant located in the old part of town, a city staple Vanya’s never been to before. It was Camille’s idea. Her blond hair glows underneath the low yellow lamp. It casts dark, romantic shadows on her face, making her look like a flapper from the 1920’s. 

Their voices mingle with the quiet music and conversation around them; a symphony of people. 

“The other day, the mag published a couple of these Thai recipes that I think we should try,” Camille announces. 

“Sure,” Vanya smiles.

“We’d have to buy some new spices, sauces, those sorts of things. It should be okay though, there’s an Asian grocery store two blocks away, I think… It’d be fun to cook something new with you, make a little date-at-home out of it.” 

“Sounds great.”

“You read my article on new date ideas, right? I was pretty proud of that one,” Camille points at her playfully with her straw. 

Vanya swallows. “Oh… no, sorry, I didn’t.” 

“That’s okay, it was kinda buried in with the rest of the lifestyle stuff. Anyway, what’s been going on with you at the orchestra?”

“Oh, just… normal stuff, I guess.”

Camille cocks her head. “I heard they had a minor break-in in one of the offices, right? What’s up with that?”

She didn’t hear about that. Vanya’s a bit out of the loop when it comes to workplace-news.

“Um,” Vanya flounders. “Just that, I think. I don’t know.” 

Camille holds her narrow gaze and sucks in her cheeks. She doesn’t say anything in response, and they don’t speak for a while, just eating.

“What do you think of the food?” Camille finally says.

“It’s okay.”

Camille looks at Vanya’s plate; she ordered a chicken alfredo. Simple and unsurprising. 

“Just okay? What, is it bad?”

“It’s not bad, it’s just okay.”

“Well,” Camille fiddles with her fork. “I guess it doesn’t beat anything you had at your old house, right.”

Vanya shakes her head. Growing up isolated and under an eccentric billionaire gave her an unusual set of standards, sure, but she hoped she didn’t come off as too snobbish. “It’s fine, really.”

“‘It’s okay,’ ‘it’s fine,’” Camille huffs, “but, do you have any actual feelings about it? Do you want to come to this place again? Come  _ on, _ help me out here.”

“I’m really sorry, Camille… I just can’t really taste it,” she admits, guiltily. 

Camille stares at her. “Oh. Why?”

“The meds, I guess.”

Her girlfriend looks at her, confused. “Oh. You just never told me that, before,” she says to herself, poking at her own dish. “Well, okay.”

Vanya just continues to shovel food in her mouth, before it gets cold; cold, soggy food is the worst.

Camille tangles pasta on her fork aimlessly. “We’ll have to buy more noodles, though. Is that all your brother eats? I’m glad I don’t have to do his dishes, really, but jeez.”

“Thank you, really, for tolerating it,” Vanya says profusely. 

“It’s fine. If it makes you happy,” Camille says. “If it  _ does _ make you happy, anyway.” 

“It does,” she insists.

“How have you two been, anyway? 

“We’re okay.”

Camille sets her fork down and falls backward in her seat.

* * *

_ T-minus-2,370 days until the Apocalypse: _

“What’s all that for?” Vanya asks, stepping over the taped-together newspapers Five splayed out on her kitchen floor.

“Work,” is all he replies with, drawing and adding calculations for another probability map with a blue Crayola marker. Camille’s at work now, so it’s just him and Vanya.

“Is it the apocalypse?” 

She sets a cup of coffee on the floor next to him. When he tastes it, he realizes she’s put cream and sugar in it—something he used to enjoy on their rendezvous at Griddy’s, back when they were 13 and hankering for sugar, but not something he can stand now at 23. He tries not to make a face.

He simply nods at her. The coffee’s already been made, and he won’t waste it. 

Vanya gives a defeated sigh from somewhere above him, and continues to practice her violin. 

* * *

Something that Vanya appreciates about Camille is that she’s creative. Vanya may be a violinist and technically an author, but Camille’s the truly inventive one. She’s a writer for an arts and culture magazine and publishes her own original poetry on the side. While Vanya’s playing other people’s music in the background in the orchestra, or simply reiterating her whole life story with the words she couldn’t share in her childhood; Camille’s the one who offers something new to the world. And Vanya admires that.

That’s how they met, actually: Camille was sent to write a feature on her book, do a profile, all sorts of things that make Vanya feel self-conscious and awkward. And after she finished her feature,  _ would you believe it— _ she asked Vanya out. Said she was really inspired by her story, that she thought Vanya was perhaps the most interesting person she’d ever come across.  _ Interesting— _ nobody ever said that about her, before. 

Her first girlfriend at the age of 22. And here she thought she was going to die alone.

* * *

_ T-minus-2,369 days until the Apocalypse: _

He steals his sister’s book from the library to write more notes in. He doesn’t have a good reason to, admittedly; he could just steal a journal from the adjacent book shop, but it just feels right, somehow. 

Vanya has no idea about the tattered copy he keeps with him in his duffel bag. He’s not sure how she’d react. Or how he would explain himself. 

Meanwhile, he pours into the library’s reference section, flipping through encyclopedia after encyclopedia. He wishes he had access to dad’s vault of information—CCTV footage spanning back over 20 years, aggregated files on potential and current arch-nemeses, criminal records. Instead, he assigns values, draws graphs, and looks up formulas, and does all his own research. He hides in a dark alcove in the back to avoid curious and increasingly uncomfortable librarians.

He scribbles a note to himself and writes down the names of a few candidates worthy of further research. Vanya’s words are in the background, the same pages that accompanied him for nearly a decade, and he can hear her voice in his head saying them out loud, as his eyes trace over them out of habit. 

She didn’t say much about him specifically, actually, though based on the majority of the content in her commentaries, that may be a good thing for him. 

It was strange, especially on the first read-through, to see himself talked about like in a eulogy; except he wasn’t dead, and she knew that somehow, and therefore she wasn’t mourning him. Just reminiscing. 

* * *

Vanya and Camille watch TV on the couch. In the periphery, she can see Five, hunched over on the floor with his mass of taped and scribbled-over newspapers.

He’s completely quiet and laser-focused on his work, and Vanya’s trying to be considerate by having the volume down low—she knows he hates noise distracting him.

Ever since he threatened her, Camille’s been understandably hesitant to engage with him, but since then he’s abided by the rules of giving her plenty of space and hasn’t pulled any other displays of violence, thankfully. 

Camille’s watching him climb over to different parts of the floor to make nonsensical notes to himself, like he’s playing a particularly intense mental game of Twister. 

“What’s he working on?”

“Math, mostly,” Vanya answers.

“Hey,” Camille calls out to him. “What is all that for, anyway?”

“None of your business,” he replies churlishly.

Camille looks back at Vanya. 

“He’s trying to figure out how the world ends, I think,” Vanya explains softly. 

Camille glances back at Five. “Cool,” she hums to herself, not hiding her amusement.

“It’s not  _ cool,  _ you simpleton,” Five hisses without his eyes even leaving his work. “There’s nothing  _ cool  _ about the whole world being destroyed.”

Her girlfriend wouldn’t understand. Vanya’s never told her—she’s happy to let her believe that her brother’s just crazy; it’s simpler, that way. Better than to stress Camille over something she doesn’t have control over. 

And it’s not like she totally understands him or his reasons now herself, anyway. 

“You know, therapy works,” Camille mutters. 

Five flips her off.

* * *

_ T-minus-2,368 days until the Apocalypse: _

“Could I ask you to do something?” asks Vanya.

It’s early in the morning and he’s having breakfast with Vanya. Well; she’s eating breakfast. Five’s just chewing on a piece of bread with his coffee. 

After being starved for so long, the body asks for less to survive. This is true in many areas, Five thinks. He finds he doesn’t need to sleep as much as he used to, either.

“What is it?”

“I know you don’t like her.” 

Which isn’t true. Five is completely indifferent to Camille, actually, stringent rules and the occasional annoying behaviors aside. He tries to listen, still; he doesn’t like the look of Vanya’s pleading expression.

“But, she’s still my girlfriend. And we all live together now, so, could you be kinder to her? Please?”

“Does it matter? The plan  _ is _ for me to leave at some point soon, anyway.” 

She doesn’t reply; he gets the notion that he may have hurt her feelings. He tries not to feel guilty about it, however; he’s only stating the facts. 

* * *

Most of the time, Five’s already awake when Vanya steps out of her bedroom, but on occasion she has to wake him up. She always feels bad when that happens: he’s obviously not sleeping much, from the hollowed-out look in his eyes, and he’s still as skinny and sallow-faced as he was when he first came back. 

So she waits, before giving in to necessity. 

When she finally does go over to the couch to wake him, he’s still passed out, arms strung out over the side. His lips are parted slightly, and he’s drooling slightly onto the pillow. 

It should be gross, but Vanya can’t bring herself to care. After all this time, even as an adult, he still  _ drools  _ in his sleep? It’s  _ stupidly _ endearing, and she almost has to laugh at him for it. 

Carefully, she kneels in front of the couch, and moves some of his hair out of the way to check on his head wound. His stitches look fine, thankfully. He seems to be recovering fine, hasn’t been complaining of pain or anything, though she hasn’t seen him jump in awhile. His powers are really taxing on his energy, she remembers, so that’s probably why. She used to record his stats for dad’s experiments with him. 

After all this time, he’s still hers, in these little ways. She shouldn’t forget. 

Not thinking, she leans over and kisses him lightly on his cheek. Immediately, she scolds herself— _ how embarrassing would it be if— _ though thankfully, he’s not woken up by it. 

Backing away, she shakes his shoulder instead.

He stretches and groans before finally getting off the couch. After getting ready, he’s out the door, without hardly a word.

It troubles her, for the rest of the day. Physical affection wasn’t common in their childhood to any extent, and after ten years of distance and only a few days of being together again, it just feels like it’s too soon to be doing anything like that. 

She doesn’t regret it, though. She missed him, misses him still, so she’ll take what she can get. 

* * *

_ T-minus-2,367 days until the Apocalypse: _

He misses Dolores.

Sometimes he takes the bus to where the Gimbel Brothers is, further in the outskirts of the city. He never has the courage to actually walk into the department store, though—it’s daylight and there’s too many people around for him to take her back. 

He still wishes he could talk to her though. He tries to imagine her voice sometimes, but it’s easier when she’s actually there to talk to him. He wants to bounce equations and ideas off of her. Have her presence nearby while he’s doing his work, like he did for the past decade.

It was so easy to talk to her. She understood everything he had to say and told him everything he needed to hear. 

That night, he comes home to an empty apartment—Vanya said something about going on a date, that morning—so he heats up a can of soup for himself on the stove, and sits down to watch whatever’s on the TV. 

He doesn’t really know what channels are what—the Hargreeves never watched cartoons or TV shows or even the  _ evening news  _ as kids. Reginald Hargreeves was convinced it’d rot their brains out and instead took it upon himself to provide for their education on everything, including world events, to filter out the drivel and drama. Five’s pretty sure his family was the last in the country to learn about 9/11. 

Five surfs the channels on the TV. They’re talking about people killing their pets and other grisly things, fearing the apocalypse, the one he  _ knows  _ is a phony. It’s strange to see things broadcasted that he already knows will come to fruition, spoken about as if they are a mystery. His life is like a novel read backwards, now. 

He’s right where he should be, time-wise. Twenty-three, the same age as the rest of his siblings, as if he’d never fell out of time at all. And yet, he still feels overwhelmingly dislocated and displaced. Living in the past, waiting to catch up to the present. 

Unzipping his duffel bag, he pulls out Vanya’s book; the tattered and dirty one that he kept in the end of the world. There’s no logical reason to keep it. These notes are all defunct and worthless now, anyway. 

He opens the lid and places her book in the trash can. A 13-year-old Vanya stares forward at him dolefully. 

“Goodbye, Vanya.” 

* * *

Camille’s shifting uncomfortably in the seat in front of her. 

“Vanya… I’m going to say something you really won’t like, but I really, really need to say it.”

Vanya already knows what Camille’s going to say. She feels a weight roll over her chest, suffocating her. 

“We need to talk about your brother.”

Vanya starts to speak, but Camille cuts her off with a shake of her head.

“I know, I know. Listen, I understand,” she rests her fingers on her temples. “He’s your brother, he’s been missing for a long time. I get why you want to help him; why you’d want to spend more time with him. It’s really sweet. Noble, actually.” 

“...But?”

“You’re a really sweet person. Really kind. It’s a good trait, I’m not criticizing you.” 

_ But you are. _

“I’m just afraid you’re being taken advantage of. I know this may seem… crazy, or harsh to you, but what if he’s just not the same person you remember him to be?”

_ Well, no shit he’s not.  _

He’s ten years older; dust and wind whittled him to the bone and carved him into a mean and hungry creature. Once upon a time, she called him her sole confidante. She invented those words not too long ago. Not that much older than her relationship with Camille. 

He’s estranged from her, but still not so strange. 

She doesn’t know how to explain it. What  _ is _ he to her, now? They didn’t need words like this back when they were kids. They just  _ were.  _

“I don’t understand.”

Camille shakes her head. “He’s grown up, Vanya.” Her voice is hushed, and sympathetic. “You both did. I just think that… whatever happened to him in all that time, what if it affected his mind? You know?”

Vanya stays quiet. If she tries hard enough, she can hear the mechanical hum of the light. It’s nauseating. 

“I’m saying, it’s not your responsibility to take care of him. He needs help, yes, but it’s not necessarily yours to give.”

“Then who’s is it, Camille?”

“I dunno, Vanya,” Camille huffs, harsher than she means to. Her expression softens. “A therapist, maybe? It helped you.”

She already knows Five isn’t the most… stable person. He’s always been like this; he gets into these Victor Frankenstein-type moods, where he shuts himself into the crypt to obsessively and fastidiously work on whatever hellish project he’s on, only coming to reason after Vanya slams the brakes on him. 

But therein lies the contradiction: how much  _ does  _ she know him? Would he even listen to her now?

“We might be able to get you guys in touch with housing and other resources, too. He can’t sleep on our couch forever, Vanya. He needs to be able to live on his own. I know this is hard for you, but… he has to go.” 

“And what if I say no?” Vanya says, finally, trying to conceal the old bitterness rising out of her chest.

“Well,” Camille crosses her arms tightly. “Then I don’t know  _ what  _ to do. He can’t stay on the couch. It’s not a three-person apartment, it’s too cramped already. I guess I could move back out?”

“I guess you’re right,” Vanya says quickly, panic rising in her chest like an encroaching tsunami. “Don’t leave, I’ll figure it out, I promise—as soon as we get home, okay?”

Camille purses her lips, looking away. “Alright.”

_ Crisis averted,  _ but the calm doesn’t come, her heart still beating frantically in her chest and in her ears; white noise. She wonders if she forgot to take her dose today.

Voice wavering, she speaks. “Do you want to head home now, or is there something else?”

Camille gazes at the table for a long moment, fiddling with the snakelike paper her straw came in. 

“...No. Let’s go.”

* * *

Every so often, he’ll get glimpses of the Vanya he knew in childhood, and it’ll feel like he never left. That these moments are like the spare but precious ones he shared with her when they were young. But time and space are essentially the same thing—both are a type of distance.

Five is a sailor of time. The great gaping mouth of Charybdis is up ahead, but he can’t stop. He must get to the other side. 

It’s late, but he leaves the house again. 

* * *

Vanya and Camille hike up the stairs to their apartment together in silence.

The apartment door looks especially austere in the dim light. It could be anyone’s apartment door. Sometimes she forgets these things; this apartment isn’t hers, actually, she’s just renting it from someone and calling it her own, though it could be taken from her at any moment. 

“I’ll get the door,” Camille says, letting herself in and heading straight down the hallway.

The TV is still on some raunchy reality show that only plays after dark. The apartment is quiet. Five’s duffel bag—the one thing he was allowed to keep in the apartment—is gone. 

“Five?” she calls. 

No response.

Camille comes out of the bathroom. She finds her sitting on the couch, catatonic and phantom-pale. 

“Oh… Vanya,” is all Camille can say. Pity is too offensive, sympathy too unearned. 

“Well,” Vanya breathes. “Looks like you got what you wanted.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Houdini's a last name, but whatever. And thanks to everyone who left kudos and comments, they mean a lot to me :) 
> 
> Next chapter up: Klaus! Things are going to start picking up pretty quickly now.

**Author's Note:**

> [my tumblr](https://nerdkiller.tumblr.com/)


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